


A Study in Convenience

by captainpeggy



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Character Study, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Nightmares, Pining, Unresolved Romantic Tension, Unresolved Sexual Tension, look i can't decide which one it is maybe it's both
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-19
Updated: 2019-09-19
Packaged: 2020-10-21 14:22:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,087
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20694995
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/captainpeggy/pseuds/captainpeggy
Summary: This world has a way of tangling people into webs. We are a sum of the names we call ourselves and the names we're called by others. We are a sum of every time we drift into sleep and every time we wake before the sun. We are a collage of contradictions. We are our pasts. We are our futures.But nobody asks if we want to be.A reflection on Fjord, identity, and vulnerability.





	A Study in Convenience

**Author's Note:**

> CW for canon self-harm. If the falchion scene bothered you, proceed with caution!

Fjord still dreams about it.

These dreams aren’t omens, or messages, not threats or promises. They are just--_ just_\-- dreams. Ordinary, pulse-pounding, terrifying, exhilarating dreams that leave him choking awake on adrenaline rather than saltwater. He dreams about the lava, about the faint light of the molten rock in the darkness, about the scorching heat that set sweat prickling across his skin.

He dreams about the falchion, about his own blood dripping off the blade, about the fresh pulse of pain with each breath. He dreams about his reflection in the sword, glaring back at him with all the fury of a man at the end of his rope, two opponents matched too evenly for either of their goods. Warm, sticky blood pouring from the wound, soaking his underclothes, staining his armour, dripping-- _sizzling_\-- on the stone.

Then he wakes up. He grabs at his chest frantically, trying to stop the bleeding, trying to heal the wound with the divine light he’s barely learning to channel, or to hold his ribs together with his bare hands if he has to, but he never has to for long, because Caduceus is there, just like he was that night. Fjord doesn’t know if the man _sleeps_. He’ll ask, someday, but he never asks then, because then there’s tears in his eyes and he’s forgotten how to breathe and it’s all he can do to let Cad pull him close and hold him until he remembers.

It’s happened more times than he’s counted. They set up next to each other every night, Fjord against the dome and Caduceus beside him, and when rest tries to evade him he listens to the slow rise and fall of Caduceus’ breath until he falls asleep. And sometimes, most times, that’s all. They awaken in the morning, ordinarily, with everyone else, pack their things, carry on in the way that their motley family does.

But on the nights when that doesn’t happen-- on the nights where Fjord wakes up in the dark, clawing at the scar tissue over his sternum, gasping for air, gagging at the salty taste of tears on his lips-- Caduceus rests a warm hand on Fjord’s chest, murmurs something inaudible, and maybe it’s magic or maybe it’s just him but the terror slowly, slowly melts away and the restraints around his ribcage loosen enough for him to take in a lungful of air.

“That’s better,” says Caduceus softly, decisively, and shifts closer, making no move to pull his hand back.

Waking from Uk’otoa, that was loud, violent. This fear is quiet, almost paralytically so, and in some ways that’s worse and in some ways it’s better. He doesn’t think most of the party notices. If they do, they say nothing.

A few times, over Caduceus’ shoulder, he’s caught a glimpse of grey-blue eyes watching silently from the other side of the dome. Not judging. Not... not even analyzing. Just watching. Six months ago, Caleb looking at him like that would have set Fjord on edge. But there’s a point where he stopped caring and a point where he started trusting, and maybe it’s one or the other or both, but he just meets Caleb’s gaze for a moment and closes his eyes, and the wizard’s never awake when he opens them again.

There’s a strange intimacy in it, in the comfort, and every time Fjord can’t help but be reminded of when he stumbled over Caduceus _that night_, the way the cleric had taken in the sight before him with a gentle sort of pity, gathered him into his arms and picked him up like a child. That, Fjord remembers. The steps he took towards the kiln, the hurling of the falchion... for something he relives in his sleep so often, he can hardly tell what’s a memory and what’s a dream. But Caduceus carrying him, that was real, and he remembers it in flashes of emotion.

Maybe it should have been embarrassing, but the word’s alien when it’s Caduceus, and instead all he remembers is the feeling of safety, of comfort, of warmth.

He wants to feed that feeling into his veins, displace every drop of half-orcish blood in his body and have his heart pump Caduceus’ sunlight through him instead.

The meaning of that is not lost on him.

//

Fjord was seventeen and he’d fallen hard for a girl he met at the docks, a page who worked as a message-runner between crew and wealthy customers too good to leave their ivory towers. It was a relief, really, when he’d first seen her and felt his stomach flutter and his face flush: it meant that he’d made a mistake, that he only had the one burden to bear after all, that he didn’t have to be a freak in more ways than one. She was sweet-- elven, but a kind of elven he’d never seen before, with three identical scars on either side of her neck and an extra curve to her ears that seemed almost to mimic the fins of a fish. He’d never asked. It had seemed rude. She’d told him eventually: _I’m a sea elf, she’d explained, the scars are gills, they seal up when I leave the water. Bit freaky, I guess._

It didn’t seem to bother her that people stared a little longer than they should have sometimes, that she could never find gloves to fit her slightly webbed fingers, that her skin grew brittle in dry weather as a reminder she wasn’t built to walk on land. It was something effortless, something that just was how it was so she might as well accept it-- because it came with good as well as bad, sure, and even if it didn’t it was part of her for better or worse.

Fjord wished he could be that nonchalant about the uneven greenish hues of his skin, about his stocky frame that left him _barely_ the tallest and _barely_ the broadest in any and every group (despite the fact that he couldn’t do a damn chin-up-- what was the _point_ in being big if you didn’t get strength to go with it?)-- about the piercing yellow of his eyes, his slitlike pupils, and above all, the tusks that curled stubbornly from his lower jaw to dig into his lip like an inescapable reminder that he lived and breathed the life of a freak.

Maybe he could have found that nonchalance, if he’d been given a chance. But whenever he forgot for the most fleeting of seconds, in the seconds after he woke up, in the adrenaline rush of alleyway scraps, in the space between mirrors... it never lasted. People reminded him, or in their absence he reminded himself. _Monster._

He wasn’t born hating himself, which made him hate himself even more, in a paradoxical kind of way.

But he’d fallen for this girl, and the two of them were young and idealistic and they wondered and wandered and dreamed, and for the first time Fjord dared to think that perhaps one day he’d find a place where he could just be, that someday he’d find friends who wouldn’t care if he broke every damn mirror in the city and did everything he could to forget his own face.

It’s a bold thing that adolescents do, falling in love. They play at being grown-ups, but they refuse to realize it’s all a game, that they don’t know shit about how cruel the world is and can be and will be to them.

So after her, Fjord kept his eyes down for a while.

And he cradled the knowledge that in this way, at least, in this heartbreak over a woman, he was normal.

But then, of course, came Sabien.

The thing that had always struck Fjord about Sabien was how damn much he _cared_. Bitterly, cruelly-- he cared in ways that seemed oxymoronic, that were devoid of compassion. But there wasn’t a shred of apathy in the man, and it was frightening, and it drew Fjord to him like a moth to a flame.

Maybe it would have been easier if he’d hated himself for that. Sabien certainly did, not that he’d ever admit it. Once or twice, Fjord had gotten a couple of drinks into him and broached the subject of whether he’d ever told anyone before, and Sabien had spat at him and told him to _mind his own fuckin’ business, because there was nothing to tell_, and later that night he’d fucked him almost sweetly in the cramped quarters of the ship’s hold and Fjord had pretended he couldn’t see in the dark so Sabien wouldn’t have to come up with some bullshit about why he was crying.

They weren’t good for each other. Sabien wasn’t good for anyone. Fjord-- well, Fjord wasn’t even good for himself. But common sense had never been either of their fortes.

Fjord was fine with it, sort of, in a certain sense of the word. Fine with falling on his knees for a man. In the early days, the first time Sabien had worked the rigging shirtless on a hot day, the first time he’d gone to shove Fjord aside and lingered just a second too long with his hand on his chest, the first time Fjord had straightened up from a stretch and seen Sabien watching... well, in the early days, there’d been dread there, a creeping realization that it hadn’t been a mistake, that his appreciation for men hadn’t been a childish phase at all. It wasn’t that Fjord thought there was anything wrong with it. Just not-- _not for me_, he’d prayed when he was young, _not for me, not this too, not another damn reason for people to stare and gossip_\--

It was inconvenient. That was the word. He didn’t have any moral compunctions around it, didn’t hate himself (not for _that_), didn’t feel shame or disgust, didn’t apologize. But sometimes they’d take on a new crew member and after a while they’d catch on to him and Sabien and the ten-second stares (at his skin, his frame, his eyes, the scarring where his tusks had been) would turn into fifteen seconds, and it wasn’t much, objectively, but there were only so many reasons you could carry around for someone to beat you up before your back gave out.

Inconvenient.

That was the word.

Jester wasn’t inconvenient. Jester was perfect. She was sweet, she was pretty, she was powerful and kind and tough all at the same time. She was soft in all the places that Fjord was scarred, and she was head over heels for him, or so it seemed.

It would have been so easy.

Molly, though, Molly was inconvenient. Inconvenient by choice, because he was who he was and there was no damn way he’d move for any god save himself, and if that made him a roadblock, well-- _that sounds like an iss-ue, not an iss-me_, and fuck if Fjord couldn’t still hear his voice, a smirk audible even from the afterlife. He’d had sharp teeth, the tiefling, fangs that jutted out from lavender lips when they curled into a smile, and every time they did Fjord’s tongue rubbed at the damaged shreds of his tusks almost involuntarily. He spent a lot of time looking at Molly’s fangs, probably for more reasons than one.

And Caleb was inconvenient, too, but at least Caleb had the balls to hate himself for it, to grasp Fjord’s hand without hesitation as blood filled the water and look him in the eye with a strange mixture of conviction and melancholy. Caleb’s hands never shook until after the fights were over, drawing components from his pouch, tracing intricate sigils with practiced ease right up until their foes lay charred and smoking on the ground, and then he’d break, falter, be overtaken by his worry again. Fear, that was something Fjord and Caleb both knew well. It rushed through their veins every time that claws flashed in the light, every time that the cool metal of a sword met their neck in threat, every time they looked around the room to realize they’d been quietly surrounded, every time a bolt of lightning or a burst of flame hit home and pain exploded across their torsos like white-hot fireworks. Fear could be good, could keep you alive. Worry, on the other hand... Worry snuck up on you when your thoughts quieted, crept into your mind to sow the seeds of a million nightmare scenarios. And with a mind like Caleb’s... who could blame him?

Molly. Caleb. Inconvenient.

And Caduceus...

Well. Caduceus was something else entirely.

//

“I missed this,” he says in his low, rumbling voice, and Fjord looks up from where he’s stacking his armour neatly on a chair in their room, beside where Caduceus has hung his lichenous breastplate and left his gnarled staff leaning against the wall. The firbolg has settled on the bed, seated on the right side, facing Fjord-- the right side, the one Fjord rolls to when he awakes wracked with terror, the one he can’t bring himself to sleep next to when it’s empty.

“Hm?” Fjord asks.

“This,” says Caduceus, gesturing to the room. “You. Me. Roommates.”

Fjord suddenly becomes very interested in buckling and rebuckling the straps of his armour so they lay flat. “We’re always roommates.”

“Well, yeah. But not just you and me.”

His voice is simple, utterly innocent, entirely genuine. Caduceus is not a liar. It almost _hurts_ to hear, makes Fjord’s chest twist right below the scar left by the falchion. It’s easy to see why they call it _heartache_.

Fjord pulls a rag from his pocket, sits on the floor with his back to Caduceus, because if he makes eye contact now it’ll break him. He pulls one of the vambraces into his lap, spits on the rag, and begins to polish it with practiced motions. The armour’s clean. It’s the one thing about him that doesn’t need polishing.

“I’ve missed it too,” he says, quietly.

The silence hangs heavy, but comfortable. Fjord finds an imaginary stain on the underside of the leather and scrubs at it fervently.

“Caleb can clean that for you, if you ask him,” Caduceus suggests.

“It doesn’t need it,” mutters Fjord. “Just a habit.”

“Oh. Well, that’s fine, then.”

It’s getting late: the sun’s long down, and even the carousers in the street are beginning to quiet. They’ll have to work tomorrow just like anyone, and even the most chaotic pubs have to be open again for lunch. The moon is beginning to creep into their window frame, casting a gentle, cool glow across the room where the candlelight doesn’t reach. It’s a soft light. It’s beautiful.

Dust dances in the moonlight. It makes Fjord think of Molly, just for a second. Not in a tragic sort of way. Not even in a melancholic one. Just... just for a second.

“Come here,” says Caduceus. “You need to sleep.”

“So do you,” counters Fjord.

“Exactly.”

Fjord closes the buckles, adjusts the pile of armour, folds the rag and places it on top. Carefully, one piece at a time, he sheds his clothes: he trades his undershirt for a clean one, his leggings for simple cotton pants. It’s a luxury, clean clothes to wear to bed. They’d stopped at a river on the way into town, beat their spare clothes against rocks and scrubbed at them till they were stiff and neat as the day they’d got them. Magic could snap the dirt away, but there’s more to clean clothes than the absence of filth.

When they’re on the road, mostly, they sleep in their armour, or failing that in heavier clothes, keeping up some level of modesty, some level of defense. But here, now, there’s a moment of peace. A moment to let their guard down.

“Those are new scars,” Caduceus remarks mildly.

The back of Fjord’s neck burns, and he shakes his head a little, nonchalant, like it’s not a big deal. “Well-- yeah. Been putting myself in the line of fire a lot.” He scratches self-consciously at the damaged skin on his arms, takes a deep breath before he turns around.

Caduceus is still sitting there.

Their eyes meet, just for a moment, like they have a thousand times before, and-- almost tentatively-- Caduceus reaches out a hand. “May I?”

Fjord’s first instinct is to flinch away, to grab his tunic back off the chair, pull it on, cover his arms. He swallows hard, feels his fingers twitch in the first motion of the somatics for _Disguise Self_, an instinctive effort to hide himself with the arcane... but he stills his hands. He takes one step, two, settles slowly onto the bed beside Caduceus. Holds out his arm, palm down.

Caduceus takes his hand gently, runs long fingers over the patchwork of scarring that is his forearm. “Do you like them?”

The question catches Fjord off guard. “I-- they’re scars.”

“I know,” says Caduceus. “Do you like them?”

Fjord thinks for a minute, as much as he can think with Caduceus looking at him like that, like anything about to come out of his mouth may as well be gospel for all the attention he’s allotting it. “I don’t know. I don’t, uh, think so. But they’re important.”

“Interesting,” Caduceus murmurs, and traces the gnarled tissue of one particularly brutal cut that arcs from elbow to wrist, long fingers stilling at the joint.

And then he lifts Fjord’s hand to his lips and kisses it.

It is light, barely a brush of breath against skin, and then Caduceus looks back up, smiles and blinks lazily in a manner Fjord could only describe as _feline_, and snaps his fingers and the oil lamp beside the bed goes out.

“Good night, Fjord,” he says in the darkness, and releases his hand.

There is a moment there when Fjord almost doesn’t let go. A moment when he considers holding on, pulling Caduceus into a kiss, tangling his fingers in long pale-pink hair. There is a moment when he indulges himself, when he imagines-- just for a split second-- that things were simple, that things were easy.

Fjord’s hand falls back onto the sheets, and it rests there for a moment before he stands and walks around to the other side of the bed, curls up under the rough wool blanket, and waits for the soft, even breaths of his friend to lull him into unconsciousness.

There are no dreams that night.

**Author's Note:**

> This document is saved to my computer as "bi_fjord_rights_i_guess.odt"
> 
> oh MAN fjorclay got me FUCKED. UP. shoutout to the 5 people in this fandom who were shipping it from the get-go. how does it feel to be prophets
> 
> This week's thing rec is 'The Gods Of Gotham' by Lyndsey Faye, and the whole trilogy following it. It's a mystery set in 19th-century New York, and it's one of my favourite books of all time. The main character and his brother have one of the most complex, best-written relationships I've ever seen. I could gush about these books for hours y'all.
> 
> As always, thanks so much for reading! Comments make my day if you're able to leave them, but no worries if not. :) Wishing you a lovely day!


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